When Vivekananda Met Tesla: Modern Physics’ Earliest Trysts with Vedanta

It is generally accepted that Vivekananda changed the world by bringing the movement for self-knowledge to America. He influenced some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century that include William James, Leo Tolstoy, Sarah Bernhardt, Lord Kelvin, Romain Rolland and later the writers Christopher Isherwood and J.D. Salinger. His movement started a process which, one hundred years later, led Lisa Miller, a prominent American journalist, to announce that “conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity”.

Nikola Tesla is not that well known these days in spite of the eponymous electric car, a technological tour de force that is expected to take the automotive industry in a new direction. But 100 years ago Tesla was a superstar. He competed with Thomas Edison over what should be the industry standard for power transmission. Tesla was for AC and Edison for DC, and as we know Tesla won and so in the sense of the delivery of electric power, we live in the Age of Tesla.

Born in 1856, Tesla studied engineering in Graz, Austria, but never graduated. He immigrated to the United States in 1884, and very soon he had financial backers setting up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. His inventions include the AC induction motor, power sources, and a generator of high frequency currents.

Now to Tesla’s connection with Vivekananda: It appears the actress Sarah Bernhardt introduced them to each other at a party she had thrown. This is what Vivekananda had to say of that meeting in a letter dated February 13, 1896:

“Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic prana and akasha and the kalpas. He thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go to see him next week to get this mathematical demonstration. In that case Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations. I clearly see their perfect union with modern science, and the elucidation of one will be followed by that of the other.”

Tesla did not succeed in showing this equivalence of mass and energy. But the relationship between the two was something in the air and as we know the equation E=mc2 was published just a few years afterwards, first by the Italian Olinto de Pretto in 1903 and later by Albert Einstein in 1905.

In any event, Tesla, in his search of the science of the akasha, was looking for something more than converting matter into energy. His objective was to harness the primal energy within space itself for mankind’s benefit.

In a posthumously published article called Man’s Greatest Achievement, which was written in 1907, Tesla wrote about the use of the akasha and the prana to solve mankind’s greatest problems:

“Long ago… [mankind] recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance.”

So what are the entities prana and akasha that Vivekananda and Tesla wrote about? The prāṇa in Vedanta is the vital force of life, and the ākāśa is the element often translated as ether from which the other elements emerge.

The prana is more than breath; it is the subtle energy that guides the processes of the body. Modern medical science may not accept it, but the ability of the sadhus living in the upper reaches of the Himalayas in winter, or a modern man like Wim Hof in climbing 22,000 feet of Mount Everest in nothing but shorts and shoes is an instance of mastery over it.

The Chāndogya Upaniṣad says this of the relationship between the elements of the universe: From this Self (Atman), ākāśa arose; from ākāśa air; from air fire; from fire water; from water the earth. In the Śānti Parva in the Mahābhārata, the sequence of dissolution of the physical universe is as follows: Under extreme heat, earth becomes water, then fire, then wind, then ākāśa, then space, then mind, then time, then energy, and finally universal consciousness.

The fact that energy can be generated from primordial ether (akasha) is a fundamental tenet in the Vedas. The akasha also generates other elements including matter. Therefore, much before the mass to energy transformation became established physics, Vivekananda was speaking about it and also of how the mind through the prana can do things that are outside the pale of known science.

More recently, it has become accepted that the vacuum state is associated with a zero-point energy, and this zero-point energy has measurable effects. Indeed the vacuum is teeming with creation and destruction of particles.

The idea of an akashic field that is the medium of consciousness has caught some peoples’ attention. Amongst these is the Hungarian scientist Ervin László whose 2004 book Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything posits a field of information as the substance of the cosmos.

But whereas Vedanta and the Vaiśeṣika postulate that the ākāśa is an element, it cannot be the field that carries consciousness. Consciousness is not an entity like other fields of physics because if it were so then the equations of physics will be incomplete. Physics as we know it can only be about inert objects and not the experiencing self.

Both Vivekananda and Tesla were hoping for a mutual confirmation of Vedanta and physics. But time was not ripe for it then, for physics was yet to bring in observers into the picture as it did thirty years after their encounter through the framework of quantum mechanics.

Now with the understanding of the zero-point energy of the vacuum and of the cognitive system through the discipline of neuroscience, we may be much closer to explaining the interplay of the prana and the akasha.

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Subhash Kak is Regents professor at Oklahoma State University where his work has focused on artificial intelligence, quantum information, and history of science. He is also a Vedic scholar with contributions to the fields of Indian astronomy, architecture, and philosophy and he has written over a dozen books and several hundred research articles on these subjects. His two most recent books are Arrival and Exile: Selected Poems and The Circle of Memory: an Autobiography.

1 Comment

Dhrubesh Roy Chowdhury

Swamiji met Nikola Tesla & Mme Sarah Bernhardt at a dinner party thrown by Mrs. Astin Corbin at her 425 Fifth Avenue house in New York on 5th February, 1896. Ref: Swami Vivekananda in the West – new discoveries by Marie louise Burke.